Walk the halls of digital marketing today and you’ll likely hear about search engine optimization (SEO). This is hardly surprising, given that SEO is what defines the success or failure of digital marketing strategies around the world.
Everything you need to know about search engine optimization
It is the art of optimizing a site or web page for search engines. It’s about having the best positioning possible. Search engine optimization aims to position and have the best position on the SERP (pagerank or ranking) to attract potential visitors.
Also known as SEO, it includes the techniques and creativity needed to improve rankings, drive traffic, and increase a web page’s visibility on search engines. Whether it’s the choice of keywords, the quality of the content or the hyperlinks on the page, the objective is to structure it to make it understandable “attractive” to please search engines.
Brief definition of search engines:
To answer our question we must first discuss how search engines work.
The Internet has, over the past two decades, revolutionized the way human beings interact with each other and with the world at large. This allowed people on opposite ends of the world to communicate and do business as if they were in the same room.
The Internet is what gives us access to the World Wide Web; a vast repository of data in a wide variety of formats.
This place is so vast that it would be difficult to navigate the web without a way to understand and categorize everything in it.
Rank or position tracking is the process by which you keep an eye on the positioning of your web pages on search engines.
Search engines, such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing, allow you to navigate and find information on the Internet.
Understanding how this happens is key to answering the question; “What is SEO?”
Exploration and indexing
Search engines have algorithms and robots such as Google Bot or Spider for Google, which crawl (explore) the Internet and create indexes (indexing) of all the data they find on web pages.
In other words, the main task of search engines is to assess the relevance and know what information can be found on the World Wide Web better known as the internet web.
When you make a query using a search engine, the search engine looks at its index and determines the most relevant results to show you.
Each query you make using a particular search engine, such as Google, brings in thousands or even millions of search results.
Search Engine Ranking
Rankings (Positions) are assigned based on a wide variety of parameters.
In fact, the methods used to crawl, index and assign ranks to web pages form the basis of search engine optimization.
The challenge
The major challenge that exists for bloggers and website owners is that there is fierce competition to gain favorable rankings among the billions of web pages that make up the World Wide Web.
Understanding how this happens is key to answering the question; “What is SEO?”
The struggle is made doubly vicious by the fact that few users bother to browse beyond the first page of search results. And this despite the fact that, as mentioned earlier, each search query brings thousands of results.
Indeed, 91% of Internet users say they never bother to go beyond the first pages of search results. In Google, this only contains ten results.
If that’s not enough, consider the fact that the page listed at number 1 in search results is usually rewarded with 33% of traffic.
Compare that to the number two spot, which gets 18% of overall traffic, and you’ll realize the difference page rankings make to the success of your website.
SEO Optimization
Webmasters and bloggers everywhere are challenged to find ways to make their pages more visible to search engines. This is called search engine optimization.
Optimization of web pages for search engines
Keyword research is an important aspect of SEO for a number of reasons.
We have already noted that people find the information they seek on the Internet by typing queries into search engines and using the returned results to navigate the web.
Keywords can be described as the terms used by people when entering queries into search engines.
Keyword Research enables SEO experts around the world to identify these search terms to better target potential readers. This can be done by creating content containing the most used search terms; keywords.
Knowing exactly what people are typing into search engines gives you the ability to optimize your content for better rankings.
